Sensation, Distraction, Blood, Gainsborough...

Sitting at my desk, as Fluffhead sleeps.  A festival of contradictory attitudes and stances to things in my head.  For instance: I want to be in the proper countryside (fields and fields as far as the eye can see); and I spend a lot of my free time buried in books because I’m not in the countryside, where, theoretically, I could put the book down and pay attention to the scenery.  Yet whenever I am in the countryside (hardly ever nowadays), I keep wanting to not be with everyone I am with there, so I could be by myself and read, peacefully; probably not paying a lot of attention to the, er, countryside.  I realize I am constantly lost in a play between Distraction and Sensation.

I was out, earlier, taking a package to the Post Office.  I had a weird sudden envisioning of how a way of life could be for me, if I had no distractions.  For some other time.  I was traveling with a man or woman, someone close, a companion.  I was lost in a world of sensory delight.  Some people were cleaning out a massive fountain water feature in a garden off to the side of the road, and I was only hearing the water, lost in the plish plish of the people walking, the gusting of wind that pulled off my hood.  The dried and still crunchy leaves on the street were overtaking me; I was swallowed in them, and in the thick lines of the pavement slabs, that vicious ecstatic red of the post box on the way down the hill.  It was a life of observing sensory transience, being there, sharing it.  My companion and I would drift from place to place with this our sole purpose: to see, to feel, to join in when we wanted to.  There was no higher purpose than the seeking of beautiful things and sharpened perception.  All was spirit as brown earth, wet and rolling, covered in mud, dirty and viscous.  The chaos and wildness of really seeing and feeling nature, especially the current freezing cold.  I would sit in my garden still and observing, till the cold ran through me and I would snap, simply snap as a twig would, frozen like the water in the flowerpots.

And there ended the mental meander.  I trod in a lot of mud by walking on the grass at the sides of the road on the way back up the hill.  My boots got dirty.  I felt irritated I would have to clean them.  Reality bites.

I sometimes think my tendency to observe things so closely is partly why I get so maddened and anxious and lets call it depressed, sometimes.  I remember a visit to see a good friend in hospital, years ago.  I remember it very clearly, no reason, just one of those clear as a bell memories you hold for no apparent reason, whilst other more memorable (you would have thought) things fade.  My friend, lets call him Alias Keith, was worse.  His hands were starting to go numb, which is how his legs went, and now he couldn’t walk at all.  He used to have toilet accidents.  In the horrible St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where the staff are not best sympathetic.  I can’t imagine (and there are very few things I can’t imagine, bear in mind), how awful it must have been to be there, with those people, and in such a vulnerable state, knowing I was not going to get better, but only worse.  I remember the day I visited him I was feeling vulnerable myself, a very absorptive day: not the best day to visit a hospital with someone you care about in.  I wanted to cry all over him, for him.  Not a useful response.  Keith was surrounded in the ward by people who really should have been in Pattersons (the mental wing). I would’ve gone mad myself in that ward, and it would not have taken long. 

For 2 hours, while I tried to sit with him and talk of things other than the gradual giving up of his body, things his mind could grab the shine of, and hold on to, we were visited by a man who had had a stroke.  He seemed to have lost his ability to not be creepy, and STARED at me a lot.  I seemed to offend him here and there, while we talked – he kept making motions in the air to mime stroking my ruffled feathers – which weren’t ruffled; I just couldn’t follow the weird conversation.  I draw nutters, always have.  He spoke to us for ages (uninvited) about the history of the Tribes of Israel, the Jewish diaspora, the Dalai Llama.  He had furtive, beady eyes.  To get away from him, Keith and I went to the canteen, so he could have a cigarette (that will tell you how long ago this memory is from).  He couldn’t hold the cigarette properly, it was tragic the way he fumbled with that and his lunch.  We quickly got accosted by another inmate, a total alkie who stuttered and shook, while her drip implant needle thingy slowly leaked thick deep red blood drops.  They fell on the table.  She didn't seem to care.  I remember the pain of Keith’s failing body.  I remember the oozing blood.  It’s precise colour.  How I imagined it smelled, tinted with that woman’s fear and anger.  People wonder why I hate hospitals.  They shave my brain.

As I sit here now and look out the window, Keith a very long time dead, I can let that memory fall away a bit and shuffle back to wherever it lives.  I can be conscious of the nagging feeling I have had all week – that I would feel vastly better about my life in general if I could arrange all my classic and modern classic books in alphabetical order, or perhaps by period.  That if I had the time, and re-arranged the ridiculously large contents of my wardrobe (I am an incredibly good charity shop shopper and bargain hunter when I have the spare money) – BY COLOUR and shade…by god, my life would then be harmonious. 

What absolute splatterpoo ranges through my mind, most of the time...

But just so you know I don’t spend all my mental absorption qualities on picturing dripping blood (nay nay, despite my love of horror films but absolute terror of it in real life – I can tell the difference, my friends), I’ll tell you the other thing I have been thinking about all week, as I found a video of it in one of my storage boxes I was tidying out: a Gainsborough exhibition I went to see in 2002.  It’s very annoying that I found a video, as of course, I checked online and the DVD is not available, and I have no video recorder anymore.  But the fact I have it shows how much I loved the exhibition and wanted to bring it home with me.  It was at the Tate or National Gallery, you know, one of those wondrous places.

I remember feeling slapped in the face as soon as I entered the first room of the exhibition.  There were a series of rooms, all freshly covered in soft fabrics of colours matching the paintings: ever a soft rusty peach, old leaf colour, or a dried basil, the  palest shush of a morning sky blue; deep but quiet red: a cherry left out overnight.  I have a thing for colour: it can change my brain chemistry instantly, I’m sure.  I was seduced, transported.  Raptured by the colours.  By the fact I was seeing an England I could never be a part of (the upper class people he has as subjects).  An England that never existed (idealized landscapes with picturesque peasants).  By being unreal it became as real as anything could be, a concept.  As a concept it breathed.  Marvellous.  I had dreadful trouble leaving, I felt like I had to stay – I kept saying to myself: once more round the rooms; and once more became 4 or 5 times, till I felt drunk and tripped out on the beautiful harmonious colours.  I could’ve stayed all day.  In the end, to make myself leave, I had to promise me I would come back soon, and that I could here and now buy the whole catalogue and video, keep it safe.

Ah, my favourite: the timeless, Mr and Mrs Andrews:

Look at their wonderful smug faces, and their ‘This, all I survey, is MINE!’ air.  Its wonderful, it’s how I feel every time I look at the countryside (yes, I feel I should own all of Britain’s countryside, as I would look after it properly.  And yes, there would be ramblers!  I also, however, unlike a lot of landowners, also feel the countryside owns me.  So that would definitely enter into my policies in looking after it…ehem.  Remembering I do NOT own England, and continuing on…) I used to seriously hate that picture; and wasn’t too impressed with the rest of Gainsborough either.  But suddenly I realized, one day in the National Gallery, that I adore this picture…and then I adored the rest of Gainsborough too.  I decided there had to be the slightest tinge (surely??!) of mockery in just how smug those faces are?  That if they couldn’t see it, and thought those little pursey mouths and cold wide eyes are handsome (and maybe they did?) then at least Gainsborough must have been having a tiny tiny inkling of a giggle at their expense??  The whole shebang is great.  Even if my (slap wrist, yes, retroactive historical interpretation to fit today’s mores is Not Cool, I know) ideas on Gainsborough’s sense of humour are completely wrong, suddenly I could get past my jealousy and dislike of this Smug Couple, and enjoy the lovely worlds and colours he painted.

Here are 2 amateur musicians, the Linley Sisters:

Look at that butter wouldn’t melt expression of the one looking at the painter?  She has to have been a bit of an antichrist to look that angelic?!  I mean, can anyone be as sweet looking as that and actually BE as sweet as that, over the age of 5?!  I wonder if the other sister in blue minded not being the focus of the portrait in the same way?

So there you are.  I have many little rooms in my head, and while I sit here, captured and enslaved as Fluffhead sleeps and I mind him, skint and unable to go anywhere even were I not, there are rooms in my head that give me joy, as well as rooms that don’t. 

Now, about those books…I have another 20 minutes, if I’m lucky…alphabetical, or period…or – genre?? Hmmmm…